User blog:Robin Patterson/Wikipedia's people pages
We have many pages wholly or partly , mostly from the English language version. We obviously aim (as part of our "genealogy of the world" goal) to have a page for every single individual who has a page on any Wikipedia. We have rudimentary procedures for deciding what languages shall be used, all around the idea that we have just one set of basic data for each individual, even if some of it is in different languages. Because copying is relatively easy, those individuals should be high on the priorities for those of us who do more than record our own ancestry (without ever encountering anyone who's notable enough to be on Wikipedia). User:Phlox has been talking about bulk imports of people-pages from Wikipedia, but has been inactive here for much longer than expected. We can do (and are doing) much without waiting for bulk imports. Lots of redirects will help In order to minimise duplication of effort (e.g. someone adding a person from the Dutch Wikipedia and someone else adding the same person from the English Wikipedia), we could give a high priority to the creation of a Familypedia redirect page for every language version of every single individual who has a page on any Wikipedia, the redirect page name being exactly as on Wikipedia. (User:rtol is probably one user definitely in favour of that - see Forum:Page names.) Our redirect page will go to our actual article. If there is no article yet, we can copy the whole Wikipedia article (using its name unchanged) as a starter, then move it to our preferred page name form (including actual or estimated birth year as a general minimum, and removing any WP qualifiers - such as "(artist)" - that are unlikely to be needed), then put it into "facts" form. What were Wikipedia's links to other people will now be Familypedia links to existing or future redirects on our wiki. They later can be edited to bypass the redirects (probably by bot, but Autosuggest will help manual editing). Automatic procedures It should be possible to do some of the bulky jobs by bot. Something like this: #Copy to Familypedia every WP article in whatever categories the bot owner specifies (including all of their subcategories - e.g "People from Ohio" will include every article in "People from Greene County, Ohio" etc). (Copy everything; that includes the interwikis, but comment them out so that they don't display but bots and other editors can use them.) ##However, flag the operation somehow if Familypedia already has an article (which could be a redirect) with that name (derived from operation "3" below). #Add the standard acknowledgment at the bottom of each such article, along with a new hidden Category:WP imports. #Create a redirect to each such article using the name as given in each interwiki (discarding duplicates). Manual procedures Keen improvers of the wiki can then: #pick an article out of the WP imports category, #look for birth and death years, #check whether it is a duplicate that has slipped through the bot check (and merge if it is), #if not a duplicate, move the article to our preferred form, and #turn it into a facts article with sensor page. Then our double-redirect procedures can get all of the other-language wiki redirects changed so that they point to the new article. Anyone trying manually to import that person from another Wikipedia will see that the page exists and can decide what to do but will not waste time duplicating basic data. Things we can do before that automatic stuff starts #Create redirects manually pointing to every existing person-page that has a Wikipedia equivalent; redirect page names will be exactly the Wikipedia name, from English and whichever other language-versions of WP we think could be relevant (e.g. French for Kings of France); take them from the interwikis wherever possible. #Create stub articles for every person who is the target of a link derived from Wikipedia (on people pages or on year pages, for example). will show up most of them. Category:Blog posts Category:Naming conventions